The present invention relates to an electro-photographic type image forming apparatus, and particularly to an image forming apparatus capable of detecting a current state of how frequently jamming is occurring.
In an image forming apparatus such as a copying machine and a printer, a document and a copy paper pass through a complicated path to be conveyed. Therefore, paper clogging (i.e., a conveyance error referred to as jamming) may occur.
In an ordinary image forming apparatus, immediately after the occurrence of jamming, operation of the apparatus is stopped, and the display section shows codes (jamming codes) indicating that jamming has has occurred and where aforesaid jamming occurred.
Incidentally, if, in aforesaid kind of image forming apparatus, jamming occurs at a specific portion, it is considered to be necessary that maintenance of aforesaid section is necessary. Due to aforesaid request, it has been considered that it is necessary to detect whether jamming is occurring frequently for each portion.
When detecting whether jamming is frequently occurring, jam occurrence frequency is calculated from the counted value of processed sheets (i.e., a number of copy papers or a passed number of documents) for each portion and the jam occurrence counted value. If the jam occurrence count number and the jam occurrence frequency surpass prescribed values, a warning is given.
If it is detected that jamming is occurring frequently from the counted value of processed sheets, a timewise factor is not added. Therefore, the detection results may be different from the current perception of the users.
In addition, in the conventional detection operation for detecting whether jamming is occurring frequently, the detected results could not easily be known at a remote location. Namely, the detected results were only displayed on a display section on an apparatus where jamming occurred. Thus a maintenance man positioned remote from the apparatus could not know of the occurrence of a malfunction of the apparatus.